‘Climate change is water change’ | Hacker News Reader

‘Climate change is water change’

washingtonpost.com

26 pointsMz49 comments

People talk about this being "unprecedented" however there is ample evidence that the Pueblo people lived in the Colorado River watershed, and then moved on after an extended drought. That was a few thousand years ago, and frankly I don't see the residents of Las Vegas moving on, but I can imagine that changes that happen with or without anthropogenic contribution have been affecting communities in the area. Where is the story advocating a 'keystone pipeline' type effort to carry excess water from the inland river systems over to the west?

My point is we're going to continue to suffer from too much and too little water across the country. Why not build the equivalent of the Interstate highway system to give us the power to redistribute water to where ever it is needed and route it around vulnerable cities and communities when there is too much?

> Why not build

This is a fair question, and pops up in nearly every thread about this topic, usually replied to with a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power... and/or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_D...

The idea has been raised before, and dismissed because of massive costs, unprecedented environmental impacts, and the like.

Yup.

And to put my biases on the table, I believe this is where the climate change disaster is heading. Nobody, and I mean really nobody, with any scientific training believes that humans can control the climate (yes we affect the climate but we don't yet have any way of telling it to do one thing or another). Further, our models for the ways we are affecting the climate indicate that massive changes in the way water is distributed across the country are inevitable (see this article as another example of that).

As a result we will either decide to spend the money and apply our technology to mitigating the impact of climate change on the humans, or we may (some consider it likely) experience a massive die off of humans. (which oddly some people are hoping for, they don't think it will be them. See the preppers in Montana for example)

There are many ways to create the GDP for this, one would be to employ the under employed[1]. We could allocate two trillion dollars over the next 5 years and put 10M young people to work. Or we could spend the two trillion dollars like we did over the last 5 years, adventuring in the middle east.[2] Personally, I would prefer fighting a war we can win, we understand how to survive climate change.

[1] "From April to July 2016, the number of employed youth 16 to 24 years old increased by 1.9 million to 20.5 million, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This year, 53.2 percent of young people were employed in July, little changed from a year earlier. (The month of July typically is the summertime peak in youth employment.) Unemployment among youth rose by 611,000 from April to July 2016, compared with an increase of 654,000 for the same period in 2015. (Because this analysis focuses on the seasonal changes in youth employment and unemployment that occur each spring and summer, the data are not seasonally adjusted.)" -- http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm

[2] http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic

I am a bit annoyed with the article. It has some good info, but, unfortunately, it is kind of histrionic and that seems to be what is getting most of the attention in comments. I have done some reading on water issues and the history of the Colorado River. We have been overusing its waters for decades, which has turned the mouth of the river into a salt flat instead of a rich swampland and riparian environment, but America doesn't really care because that part of the river is in Mexico. They began experimenting with bringing it back to life recently: http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/pulse-life-mouth-colorado

Anyway, we have raked this river over the coals wastefully for decades. There is lots of room for improvement in terms of better practices. Perhaps they feel they need to be histrionic in order to get lazy-assed, overprivileged Americans to take the problem seriously, but the problem is not remotely new and it not remotely unsolvable. As things get more desperate, I predict the powers that be will get more hard-assed and that will go a long way towards fixing things that, currently, there simply isn't the political will to fix.

That sounds like an absolutely massive infrastructure investment. How much would it cost to move water for tens of millions of people thousands of miles?

Growing up in one of the wetter areas, we can't even figure out how to deal with a spring thaw bringing so much water that it floods and destroys towns. What you're proposing sounds even harder.

If the people who want a lush green desert are willing to pay for such a project then I'm all for it, but I don't think this should be subsidized by all tax payers a la the Interstate system.

Remember its also the people in Louisiana who would rather not be up to their arm pits in water at home this week. Or the folks in Texas who 5 years ago worried about dying cattle herds and now worry about drowning them.[1]

[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/06/09/412236562/texas-cattle-rancher...

I think as climate change really starts getting going the American Southwest including California will need to start desalination on a massive scale or risk mass emigration. The current situation is sketchy at best, give it 20 years and most of that area will be bone dry.

Water in Southern California is a complex issue that isn't given its proper due - and desalination plants aren't the cure-all that people assume.

Desalination plants: are expensive to build; are more energetically expensive than most alternatives, which means they are also more expensive to run (its tough to take salt out of water); inefficient - compared to alternatives, more water must be processed to create the same amount of potable water; environmental concerns, from intake (water intake may also 'suck in' krill, young fish, etc. which form the bottom of the food chain) and what happens with all of the concentrated 'sludge'? Dumping it back into the ocean would surely increase salinity in the area creating dead zones; time consuming to build - more water is needed now, not 10 years from now.

In L.A. specifically, there are treatment plants like Hyperion which perform secondary treatment on waste-water and then pumps that treated water 4.5 miles into the ocean. Does it make sense to treat waste-water, pump it into the ocean so it picks up solutes like salt, then desalinate it so that it's potable and then pump it back to shore? It makes more sense to upgrade facilities so they can perform tertiary treatment to make waste-water potable - it'd be cheaper than desalination, and much of the infrastructure is already there.

Also in L.A., storm runoff gets directed into a pipe system completely separate from the sewer system, so after a rainfall all of the water gets collected and essentially directed straight to the ocean via the stormdrain system without any treatment (and it also picks up massive amounts of debris and pollution along the way). It would also make sense to treat and store that kind of run-off instead of letting it go to waste (and pollute the beaches as well).

Israel is often given as a shining example of desalination, but they also recycle something over 80% of their water for irrigation. Essentially, they used all alternatives before adding desalination. L.A. imports over 80% of its water, and only recycles ~2% of it.

Is it possible to do desalination entirely without electricity?

Ram pumps can pump water to a higher location that the water source without any added energy. The kinetic energy of the moving water is all that is needed. The waves supply the kinetic energy.

Once water is pumped into a water tower, then have a bunch of mirrors point at the tower to heat it up. Steam evaporates and flows down to a lower location.

Seems like once it is set up it would be completely stand alone without any electricity being needed. Not sure what kind of output it could generate or how efficient it is, but it wouldn't require any man-made energy.

Yes and no. It's possible, but not very efficient per space/work vs. returns. Efficiency can be improved by using electricity after all, through solar generation. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_still#Practical_consider...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_desalination

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-powered_desalination_uni...

However, also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse for a clever agriculture scheme.

Maybe living in a desert isn't such a great idea?

Living in a desert is a great idea. Living in a desert and expecting that everyone can use water as if they live in the northeast or northwest U.S. isn't such a great idea.

<looks around backyard's beautiful blooming Arizona desert> Welp it is hot outside... guess we should panic!

Wouldn't it make more sense to build a gigantic pipeline from Oregon/Washington to California?

I believe the cost of pumping it outweighs the cost of more desalinization plants.

Desalination needs energy (so does pumping of course). As long as you're not getting that energy 100% (including supply chain) from renewables you're making climate change worse.

This might be of interest to you. It never went anywhere because of costs and environmental concerns. But I have a feeling it may get more attention as water becomes more of a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...

It would be great to see some mitigation in the form of emissions reductions to boot!

For all those claiming the solution is as easy as "just moving out of the desert", people aren't the only major issue when it comes to the Colorado River's water.

So unless you're willing to forego vegetables every single winter, those farms in the southwestern desert (as backwards as it may seem) are there to stay until they're too expensive to maintain.

Why is such a large fraction of vegetables grown in a desert in the first place?

> Why is such a large fraction of vegetables grown in a desert in the first place?

Because the soil and climate (but for, you know, the lack of rainfall) is otherwise fairly optimal for it, and it is easier to move water to the desert than soil and desirable aspects of climate to the not-desert.

Correct. The soil is incredibly fertile, and at least around the Yuma/imperial valley area, it's literally the sunniest place on earth.

There's whole sections of the country that were former agricultural bastions that have gone to seed. We don't need the central valley that badly - although you may not be getting fresh baby spinach in January, there will still be vegetables, and nobody is going to starve.

I am specifically not talking about the Central Valley. The Central Valley is not a desert, nor is it irrigated using water from the Colorado river (AFAIK).

Please research this topic before responding again.

Edit: spinach? I'm also talking potatoes, carrots, lettuce, onions, broccoli and cauliflower. I wish we were only at risk of losing spinach.

> The Central Valley is not a desert,

Quite a bit of the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley (which is the southern limb of the Central Valley, the Sacramento Valley is the northern limb) is, in fact, desert.

Oops! My mistake, I usually try to forget Bakersfield exists.

All of these things can be grown elsewhere, where massive, intensive irrigation isn't a necessity. Potatoes, onions and carrots can be stored for many months after harvest, even without refrigeration, and cauliflower and broccoli hold up well to freezing. Lettuce is of very questionable nutritional value to begin with... but it can be grown with minimal effort and great productivity in greenhouses.

> All of these things can be grown elsewhere, where massive, intensive irrigation isn't a necessity.

If they could without displacing some other more valuable crop, at lower total cost than what they have been with irrigation in the Central Valley, they already would be.

Losing production in the Central Valley reduces overall supply and increases prices, whether it moves some production elsewhere (displacing existing land uses) or not.

If artificially low water costs (not to mention widespread use of illegal, sub-market rate labor) are deflating the costs, then that impacts the calculus to some degree, would you agree?

No, it doesn't change the fact that losing Central Valley production will reduce supply and increase consumer prices.

To extent that either of the factors mentioned is an actual subsidy (the labor one doesn't seem to be -- nor is it necessarily a differentiator from alternative production areas -- but the water one might be), that may mean that the reduced public cost of the subsidy may to some extent offset the increased sticker price of the no-longer-subsidized goods

How about living somewhere more environmentally friendly? Like... Not in a desert. Plenty of water elsewhere in the USA.

Where is all the water going, if it's simply not precipitation enough in these areas?

It's a combination of factors. Some's being exported as food (nuts, beef). Some isn't being recaptured, as aquifers are being depleted to the point of collapsed. Etc.

I doubt that the amount exported as nuts is significant. A rough back of the envelope calculation for almonds (I picked almonds because people complain about almonds a lot whenever water is discussed) indicates that California's annual exported almonds contain about as much water as 14 Olympic swimming pools. That doesn't seem too bad considering how large the almond crop is.

Almonds use a lot of water to grow, but most of that water doesn't actually end up in the almond, and so doesn't go with the almond if the almond is exported.

The numbers I used were 10^12 grams of almonds produced per year, 5% water content per almond, 3785 grams per gallon of water, 660000 gallons per Olympic swimming pool, and 70% of California's almond crop exported.

But where does it all end up? In the ocean? In the atmosphere? Frozen in glaciers? Is it that global warming is making it rain in other areas instead?

Some combination of those things--warmer air holds more moisture, which leads to more rainfall in some places. Rain patterns shift. Some places will get more, other places less.

Does it really matter for that particular region? Evaporation increases, weather patterns shift.

And even when the rain falls somewhere else it might just cause a flood and run off into the ocean.

With climate change we've had a noticeable increase in coastal flooding.

So maybe that's where.

The arctic is, as usual, going crazy this summer. Terrible weather for sea ice melting (lots of clouds, storms), but we'll probably still end up at the 2nd lowest sea ice extent when the minimum is reached in Sept. Happening right now is what will become the longest-running arctic summer storm since records began. Even more intense storms are forecast for 10 days time. Read more here. neven1.typepad.com/blog/

Meanwhile solar panel manufacturers are suffering from oversupply, meaning not enough purchasing. This despite the fact that prices are now down to 60 cents a watt or less.

Solar will never be cheaper than coal because coal is a rock. it'll always be cheaper to go dig coal than to make something else. Politicians need to deal with this or we are all doomed.

>Solar will never be cheaper than coal

It already is actually.

http://www.sciencealert.com/india-says-the-cost-of-solar-pow...

Coal is a rock, but you still need to build a plant to burn it, and ship the coal continuously. With solar when you set up the panels you're basically done.

> With solar when you set up the panels you're basically done

Unfortunately, you're done only when the sun shines.

Using squaponics seems like an ideal solution. Food can be grown in a greenhouse to minimize evaporation. Water doesn't escape into the soil, and it can be done pretty much anywhere, this leading to less fuel consumption and transportation costs. Fish require much less water and feed than cattle per pound of edible flesh.

https://youtu.be/P0q4o58pKwA

#phoenixdownthetubes

as the parent comment is possibly hinting at, a relevant novel exploring this is "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi

it's a bit of an unpleasant read in parts, but it is exploring a future where there isn't enough water for everyone, and many people are only left with bad options, or never really had any.

Thanks - was wondering if it was a bit obtuse. Just finished reading "The Water Knife" and yes I agree it is a bit unpleasant at times, but I find Bacigalupi's world-building quite compelling.

I might read 'Cadillac Desert' that is referenced by and inspired "The Water Knife".

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